Under his leadership Labour has drifted aimlessly. He doesn't seem to have any vision for what he wants for Britain, other then more power for Ed Miliband of course.

However, is there anybody on the Labour front bench who can rectify these problems? Not that I can see.

The Labour party at the present time is incapable of representing the people the party was set up to serve. Labour's problems run deep and stabbing the party leader in the back is not going to be any sort of magic wand that will make these problems go away.

Carswell always did seem more of a UKIPer then a Tory, with his continual arguments about EU withdrawal.

I do know a few people in that area (was last down there in November for a dinner party in Frinton-on-Sea). It's a constituency that's very receptive to the UKIP message and he is well regarded as a local MP, so I can see quite a lot of people going with him.

1) The Police & Crime Comissioner for South Yorkshire, Shaun Wright, was responsible for children's services at Rotherham Council from 2005 to 2010. His position is looking untenable.

2) Far right knuckledraggers are queueing up to make the Pakistani community scapegoats for this, but abuse on this scale can't happen without involvement from people outside that community.

3) I would not be surprised if this isn't just going on in Rotherham. For starters, were victims in Rotherham shipped elsewhere for others to abuse?

4) I have been rude about Rotherham Labour party on here before, and the fact that Rotherham politics is so utterly dominated by 1 party only makes those in power more able to get away with cocking things up. If the main opposition flagging up this issue is groups such as UKIP, who have no real regard for Rotherham's best interests then that doesn't make things any better either.

I have encountered no sense of vindication, no "I told you so", among veterans of the anti-war protest of 15 February 2003 in response to the events in Iraq. Despair, yes, but above all else, bitterness – that we were unable to stop one of the greatest calamities of modern times, that warnings which were dismissed as hyperbole now look like understatements, that countless lives (literally – no one counts them) have been lost, and will continue to be so for many years to come.

The catastrophic results of the Iraq invasion are often portrayed as having been impossible to predict, and only inevitable with the benefit of hindsight. If only to prevent future calamities from happening, this is a myth that needs to be dispelled. The very fact that the demonstration on that chilly February day in 2003 was the biggest Britain had ever seen, is testament to the fact that disaster seemed inevitable to so many people.

In a way, opponents of the war were wrong. We were wrong because however disastrous we thought the consequences of the Iraq war, the reality has been worse. The US massacres in Fallujah in the immediate aftermath of the war, which helped radicalise the Sunni population, culminating in an assault on the city with white phosphorus. The beheadings, the kidnappings and hostage videos, the car bombs, the IEDs, the Sunni and Shia insurgencies, the torture declared by the UN in 2006 to be worse than that under Saddam Hussein, the bodies with their hands and feet bound and dumped in rivers, the escalating sectarian slaughter, the millions of displaced civilians, and the hundreds of thousands who died: it has been one never-ending blur of horror since 2003.

The invasion was justified as an indispensable part of the struggle against al-Qaida. Well, to be fair, large swaths of Iraq have not been handed over to al-Qaida: they are now run by Isis, a group purged from al-Qaida for being too extreme. Iraq and Syria are trapped in a bloody feedback loop: the growth of Isis in Iraq helped corrupt the Syrian rebellion, and now the Syrian insurgency has fuelled the breakdown of Iraq, too. Those who believe that the west should have armed Syria's rebels should consider the fact that Isis reportedly raided an arms depot in Syria which was stocked with CIA help. Support from western-backed dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and Qatar has fuelled the Syrian extremists now spilling over into Iraq.

As we are having elections for the European parliament and some local councils so I thought it best to start a thread about that. The date for both of these is 22nd May

Please feel free to comment on any local elections in your area and the situation with local politics where you live. There are no local elections for me until next year so the nearest local elections to me are in Sheffield, where no doubt the Liberal Democrats will continue their decline outside of the wealthiest corners of the city.

Please also feel free to comment on the likely outcome of the Euro elections. These are the elections where you choose from a party list rather then choose a party's candidate. These are also the elections where UKIP tend to do best, in spite of their many faults.

I think the problem lies with the political parties themselves. Even if I agreed with a political party about the right way forward for this country (which I don't, voting at the moment really is a matter of choosing the least shite of a very poor bunch) I can't see any real benefit to joining a political party.

I agree that grassroots pressure groups, and organisations such as 38 Degrees are far better for those of us who don't have a spare million pounds to chuck at politics.